Monitoring visit

Yesterday Project Officer Zakaria Benameur from the European Commission came to the ITQB for a monitoring visit. The aim of the visit was to monitor both scientific and administrative aspects of my Marie Curie fellowship. He first spent two hours with the administration at the ITQB, and then one hour with me and the Scientist in Charge of the project Professor Maria Arménia Carrondo. I gave a presentation about the background of my project and an update on the status so far. After the meeting I gave Mr. Benameur a short visit of the research facilities of the Macromolecular Crystallography Unit.

I think it was nice and very useful to have this monitoring visit. I got some new ideas about other funding resources within the European Commission I can apply for in order to continue my research when the money for this project runs out. It was also nice to actually meet the person who I have exchanged several e-mails with after my project was selected for funding within the Marie Curie programme J

With a new picture I found of the ITQB (nice surroundings for research) I wish you a nice weekend!

The ITQB day

Today it is the ITQB day, and we have now attended a gathering in the auditorium, with speeches by the ITQB director and the principal of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and people who where rewarded for their scientific work in 2011. Soon we will go to the “Sardinhada”, were there will be served grilled sardines (typical for Portugal), meat for the cowards (including me) and refreshments J And the party will go on for some time I think.....

Bom fim de semana/Have a nice weekend!

Technical problems and monitoring visit

It has been quiet here for some time now.... We have had some problems with the protein purification due to some technical issues, thus we are a couple of weeks behind schedule :-( This made us postpone the planned EPR experiments, which may only take place in September now. We'll see. However, instead of the EPR we will try to perform Raman spectroscopy - another cool technique which also allows us to study the state of the metal centres in my proteins.

It is also clear that the ITQB will be visited by a project officer from the European Commision on July 12th. The aim of the visit is to monitor both administrative and scientific aspects of my Marie Curie fellowship. It will be an interesting day I think, both for the officer and for us, and we hope he will return to Brussels with positive impressions from his visit :-)

Até logo/see you soon